Always improving 1UP.com is running a story where they took six kids ages 11 through 13 and had them play ten classics from the 70s and 80s.

Donkey Kong is 'lame.' Tetris is 'boring.' Space Invaders 'needs a superbomb or something.' And why play Pong when it's more fun to 'jump up and down on one foot'?"

Interestingly enough The Legend of Zelda (NES 1987) received quite favorable treatment.

Oh Jesus...

Bobby: Because Zangief is a Nazi.

EGM: He's Russian. Not German.

Garret: He's a communist.

Bobby: Then why is Zangief's place a Nazi place?

EGM: It's not.

Bobby: Yes it is-it had a Nazi sign on the cement.

They can't even tell the difference between a swastika and the hammer & sickle. Then again, they probably don't know what the U.S.S.R. was.

United States Soviet Republic.

LoL

The conversation seems really fake. 11 year old kids don't have that advanced of a vocabulary.

I also don't think that serves as a good example of todays kids considering I'm still in my teens and I've played and loved all of those games.

i'm sure it's real.. kids are pressured to grow up fast in today's cell phone world. 12 is the new 16.

Just the fact that it is 6 kids (probably hand picked and not randomly chosen, though 6 randomly chosen kids isn't good either) is nowhere near a big enough sample for any form of accuracy.

Play nice on him, he's the youngest.

Yeah, I found the 13-year old using the word "faux" a bit odd. Kids may be pressured to grow up faster these days (in the wrong ways, if you ask me), but the only time I'd expect to hear a kid that age using "faux" would be if it had been part of the week's vocabulary assignment.

I cringed when the kid talked about playing Defender on a cell phone. I'm tired of seeing 12-year olds walking around with a phone stuck to their head.

Agreed. No one who isn't driving yet needs to have a cell phone, except perhaps if they are on a trip somewhere away from home and parents want a way to stay in touch.

Well, it's bad enough that adults are afraid to go anywhere without a cellphone, albeit one that is also capable of e-mail, compatibility with multiple IM networks, and direct connect, but we're raising an entire youth who are afraid to be without contact, whether human or digital, for more than three minutes at a time. If they're not using voice or text chat on a game, they're in IMs or in conversation on their phone, or they're glued to their PC, where they're also bouncing between IMs, e-mail, Myspace messages, etc. and so forth. The Church of Constant Contact is just too much for me.

Pah

This is the information age. The idea of being without an IM client or email or cell phone or other form of communication for more than a few minutes is unbearable. Passing notes is so old fashioned when you have instant communication.

Aside from the potential and unproven bad effects that come from prolonged cell phone use (and who knows what else), I really see kids being able to avoid the difficult tasks of looking around for friends and trying to guess if a friend remembered to meet up after school and whatever else. It's the Star Trek era... Kirk to Enterprise: omg, cme get me @ erth

Agreed. It should be implanted. Those kids need both hands to fly aircraft.

And the sad thing? When kids today receive an actual paper letter they ask "how do I open it?"

It won't be long before none of them will be able to understand cursive writing and the few bits of actual handwriting that they do will be in 13375p34k.

Hell man, when was the last time you wrote in cursive? It's a useless skill. Does this sound like a bunch old men complaining about youth. How soon we forget.

Agreed. Other than signing my name, I never use cursive. I could if I chose to, but I'd have to think about each letter to make sure I wrote it correctly because it has been so long since I've done it.

So called 1337 speak isn't even used anymore. Almost everyone thinks it's stupid. Now, it's just words being shortened into pieces thanks to IM'ing. :(

Heh. Any respected field researcher knows that a quantitative research project requires at least 100 correspondents (or at least more than 20 if your really lazy and unprofessional) to reach an "objective" point of view. Anything less is considered bias, since the human perspective in itself is bias.

They could've at least rounded up the dang number to 10 for crying out loud. Then again those 6 kids were probably really stupid to be suckered out from their living room and PS 3, Xbox or Wii.

I know it's not what they were testing for, but I'd be interested to see a test done on children from several African villages, who haven't been spoiled by modern games. Something tells me they'd love what they saw, just like we did when the old classics were new and wondrous to our minds.

AFAIK "1up" is a sort of magazine on the WWW. A magazine, not an academic journal. How do you write an article with 100 respondents, especially on a deadline?

Yes, I know. Which is my point exactly. There was a point in time where journalists made articles based on research project reports since the reliability of the information was more certain.

Especially when this particular article implies that the entire population of toddlers/teenagers are represented by these 6 individuals. Should they have had 100 correspondants? Yeah. Why? Because that's a big freakin goal when your talking about the perspective of all toddlers/teens.

Some people call it "professional responsibility to the dissemination of information." Unless the website in mention aims to be a "parody of professional journalism?"
.... I didn't think so.

Journalists still do that. But not in every article they write. Some don't need that. Some articles can say a lot in any case, and trust the reader not to draw the same conclusions that they would draw from an article based on a scientific report (a report on this topic has probably never been done, mind you).

Well, Space Invaders was a hit in 1978, but it wasn't five years later. The progress made in shmups only in that short time was enough to render Space Invaders into a stone age monument. Now it is thirty years later, and Space Invaders is still stuck in 1978. It would have been better to show them Galaga.

I had a molecular geneticist (Dr. Nathan Parker at University of Texas Austin) tell me that the reason kids these days are 'growing up faster' or seem more intelligent with larger vocabularies is due to the gradual removal of lead from the environment. Removing lead from gasoline, paints, various medicines and other chemicals has provided for less exposure and greater cognitive potential earlier in life. Whether it's true or not, it seems highly possible to me.

As far as disliking the old games, I'd expect that. A flashy game is far more appealing to a younger audience even if the gameplay is seriously lacking. I mean who here wasn't all 'oooh ahhh!' over new systems coming out boasting better graphics when we were younger giving us a predisposition to approving of a newer game even if we hadn't played it yet?

Well, I've always preferred gameplay to graphics and was perfectly happy playing text adventures and MUDs. It's true that I prefer graphics to text, but I still prefer gameplay over graphics. Without gameplay, the most impressive graphics ever seen wouldn't get me to play the game. Of course, I'm also not likely to play a game with CGA graphics these days, either... but as long as it is 16bit+ graphics, I would play it as long as it has good gameplay, even if the graphics aren't great. And some 256 color games I'd still play as well if they have good gameplay. About the only games below 256 colors that I'd still play would be Space Quest games. So, I like decent graphics, but gameplay is still a much more important thing to me than graphics.

Er...as an anti-thesis, that would mean the Neanderthal Man had more vocabulary capabilities than Shakespeare (excluding the theory of evolution that is) since man didn't discover lead back than (unless volcanic ash counts).

On a similar note, I had an interesting funny debate with my friends. One bloke believed that our generation or latter generations are much-much more compared to our fore-fathers.

I simply said, "Yeah, we're so highly evolved now, but we panic in confusion or enter catatonic state every time there's a power failure".

We are so not prepared for World War III.

Neanderthal Man was a different species with a different brain structure than that of Homo sapiens. They were perfectly capable of being less intelligent without lead or other contaminants being a factor.

As for the fore-fathers, they'd panic and enter a catatonic state if horses were suddenly wiped out, but I imagine by and large modern day folks in the US would be ok.

I have a feeling this is going to to turn into a history/evolution debate.

So to put things back on subject, I think that selecting 6 kids to draw conclusions for an entire nation of children is inaccurate. I have a feeling this was also completely made up, given the context clues (advanced vocab, witty retorts), for the purpose of getting the veteran gamers angry and thus increasing readership. Yellow journalism lives on.

Haha. I dream of the day when you can power up a computer with one AA battery.

One personal dream is one day seclude to remote mountain that oddly has internet access. Then I can show internet browsing to the local wandering tigers the wonders of MobyGames (before it eats me).

close, but you could check out volunteer positions at www.tutuaca.org

They are all solar powered with wireless interenet. Good stuff :)